I waited until nine the next morning on the off chance Miss Gray might show up at the office the way she’d shown up in my dreams, but no dice. I hadn’t expected much, but that tight knot of want in my gut kept me there, just in case. At nine-o-one, Cass and I closed up the place and headed off on the chore I’d set. I wasn’t crazy about abandoning the office, but this was definitely a two-person job.
I had an old pal in the archives at the Tribune, so we went there first.
Cora led us down into the low brick walled basement, the place the newspaper fellas charmingly called The Morgue. The name fit. The place was grim, dusty lightbulbs shining feebly under even dustier tin hoods, row upon row of tall wooden shelves bearing long lines of canvas-wrapped binders turning the basement into a shadow-stuffed maze. Ordinarily I would’ve spent a few minutes bumping gums with Cora, making nice while she chattered away in that bubbly voice of hers. It never hurt to make a source feel appreciated, and in any case I liked her sense of humor. Today, though, my mind was someplace else. I said “sure” and “uh-huh” at all the right breaks in Cora’s prattle and after a minute she left like a breeze, saying, “Good luck, hon.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, looking around at all the binders lined up on the metal shelves like good soldiers, “we’ll need it. It’s like we’re looking for a needle in a whole room full of haystacks.”
Cass put a finger to her bottom lip and cocked her head a little, then led me down a certain row and pointed at a particular shelf.
“Well, guessin’ Miss Gray’s age, I figure this is about when she’d have her coming-out party,” Cass said, tapping the paper label that identified the dates covered by the papers archived on that shelf. “Cotillion season around here is November, December, so we should start there. Of course, we may hafta work back or ahead a year, but it’s a place to start.”
I nodded, impressed at how fast she’d worked it out—impressed but not especially surprised. Together we dragged a couple of the binders to a stout wooden table in one corner of the chilly room. We sat down in a pool of light from one of those tin-hooded bulbs and started scouring the society pages from back around the time an angry, cursing young wife wearing nothing but a bedsheet tried to scoop my left eye out with her pretty red fingernails.
Cass and I thumbed our way through page after page, binder after binder, month after month until they grew into a year. After a time, Cora brought down coffee, and that helped get us through another year worth of binders. We broke for lunch at quarter till one without having found a trace of Miss Gray anywhere in those yellowed pages.
“I still don’t know why we’re bothering,” Cass said as we sat chomping chicken salad sandwiches from the Trib’s commissary. “Your face never woulda got messed up like that if you’d let go of this one like I said. And poor Hally might still be alive.”
That one stung a little, and she meant it to. I raised an eyebrow at her, feeling my wounds tug some, but not too bad. Only my eye bothered me really, still puffy and tender, and that old scar itching a little for good measure.
Cass chose not to read the look I’d given her.
“That woman spooks me, Frank,” she went on, shaking her head, making her hair bounce. “But that ain’t the most of it.”
Now she hesitated, looking down at her sandwich, poking it as if its shape didn’t please her. “Can I be honest a second?”
I’d never known her to be anything less. It was a big part of why I liked to have her around. “Why stop now?”
“It’s you, Frank. The way you’re acting lately. Not taking new cases, locking yourself up in your office … drinking all the time.…”
I was tempted to remind her that no one had come in since Miss Gray, that the door marked Private had been closed but not locked, and that I’d been a hard drinker since before I could knot a tie. But I sensed that underneath all that, she might have a point, and I didn’t want to let on, so I kept my mouth shut.
“It worries me a little, Frank,” she said, not quite meeting my eyes. “You know what a wreck I’d be if anything really bad happened to you. I hardly got a wink of sleep last night thinkin’ about you all crumpled up on the floor in the office and blood everywhere and your face. And if you go and get yourself killed, I’m out of a job. That ain’t nothin’ these days. I’ve got a mother to take care of, you know.”
I grinned. Cass’s fingers stopped poking at the sandwich and her hand started toward me and I knew she wanted to reach out and grab my hand and give it a squeeze but didn’t quite dare. I didn’t ask myself if I wanted her to. For all the years I’d known her, my relationship with Cass had been almost entirely professional—within the weird boundaries of my strange business, in any case. I’d always thought it best to keep it that way; anything else could only complicate matters. Truth was I’d never let myself think too much on how I actually felt about her, and now I realized I didn’t even know. I found myself wondering again about her life outside the office and whether or not there was a fella in it, some clean-cut type who would marry her away from me one day. I guess I’d always counted on her to be the spinster type, but that was pure selfishness. I had to face the fact that Cassandra O’Clare was a catch—a bit plain at work, maybe, but I bet she dolled up nicely, and she had plenty of moxie and brains to boot. How long could it be before some smooth-talker came along and hooked her? I found myself looking at her now as if I hadn’t ever seen her before.
“I just wish you’d be more careful, is all,” Cass finished, taking her hand back.
“I can take care of myself,” I said by way of comforting her some. If I’d responded to that note of concern in her voice, gone all soft, Cass would really have started to worry, and maybe with good reason.
Anyway, someone else was too much on my mind.
I can’t help wondering how different—how much better—everything would’ve been if I’d only put my hand out for her to take. A question like that can damn a man, I think, assuming he isn’t already damned. I try not to ask it too often, but I can’t help wondering.
Cass simply nodded at me, gave me a half smile that had a kind of lost quality to it. Not lost like my client’s haunted eyes, but … well, it was like Cass knew some important decision had just been made, that things were subtly different now and always would be.
“Sure, Frank,” she said, and ate her sandwich.
We’d managed to kill off a hefty chunk of the afternoon in that dank-smelling but somehow still dusty basement when Cass finally said, “Hey … Hey! Take a look at this, Frank!”
I sidled up next to her and looked down over her shoulder at the picture she tapped with her varnished nail. The grainy black photo on the jaundice-yellow paper showed a group of smiling girls in expensive clothes gathered around a linen-covered table. I gathered from the candles burning in crystal fixtures and the etched-glass windows behind the crowd that the scene was an expensive restaurant somewhere uptown. The girls, all in their early twenties, held up fizzy champagne flutes, grinning madly and mugging for the camera—all but one. One girl hung back some, her smile pleasant enough but rather bored, her gaze wandering away somewhere beyond the camera like she was maybe searching for a discrete escape route.
I could hardly imagine those bright, wandering eyes coming to look so hopeless and haunted, but I knew that face. Even with a few years shaved off it I knew it instantly.
Cass read the caption beneath the picture aloud. “‘Miss Damia Nyx, Miss Elenore Duncan, Miss Evelyn Night, Miss Valerie Alder, and Miss Nicolette Morgen cry “Cheers” to the opening of Ambrosia, the city’s newest, hottest hideaway.’”
My client, the erstwhile Miss Gray, was the one looking politely disinterested right in the middle of the group.
So there it was. After three days that felt like about as many months, I had her name.
“Evelyn Night,” Cass said, whispering the words as if they had some kind of magic power. I guess in a way they did.
My heart thumped double time in my chest and my face started to ache, but I pushed it all aside. I jotted down the name in my leather-bound notebook—not that I’d forget it. One look and it was etched into my brain for good. But habit took over and I wrote it anyway, and the names of the other girls, and the date at the top of the newspaper page, and the name of the place. I’d heard of Ambrosia—swanky dinner joint overlooking the park, the part of town where rents ran as high as the big steel buildings. The kind of place with fingerbowls on the tables and at least four different forks at each setting, where the waiters are all old men with accents.
“Good work, Cass,” I said. I resisted the urge to give her a little peck on the cheek. Instead, I started away, saying, “Keep looking for anything else you can find. I’ll be right be back.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Make a phone call,” I said.
“You watch yourself, okay?” she said. “I’m not callin’ Doc Ambrus again.”
That gave me pause. Not that I was too worried for myself, with the .38 snug in its holster under my arm, but I suddenly didn’t like the idea of Cass alone down here among the shadows.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day, go spend some time with your mother. I figure you deserve it—you’re the one who cracked the case, after all.”
“Huh,” Cass said with a nod. “I guess I did at that. Well whatta ya know?”
I waited until Cass’s cab pulled away from the curb, then found a phonebooth in the Trib’s big marble lobby. I raked the glass-and-wood door shut behind me, then dialed the number from memory. A minute later someone answered, “Chandler Hotel.”
Just the voice I wanted to hear.
“It’s Frank Orpheus,” I told Arthur Geiger. “Just wondering if my client’s been in at all in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Er, no, sir, Mister Orpheus,” the day manager said. “Her key’s still in the box. Do you want me to continue holding the room?”
“Yeah, you do that,” I said. “And if you happen to see her, tell her she’d best call me right away. And if she says she can’t remember me, you dial the number for her and hand her the phone. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.” I could tell by the waver in his voice this whole thing made him nervous. I wondered if he even knew why he felt that way, but I didn’t bother to ask.
“Good man,” I said, and hung up.
I hadn’t expected her to be there, but had to give it a try. Here I had the answer, the vital piece of information she’d come to me to find, and I might never see her again to tell her. The thought of it pulled the knot in my gut that much tighter. I wanted—hell, needed—to see her face when I said that name to her. I guess I hoped it would undo what that other name—Mr. Menace—had done. I hoped it would give some color back to those cheeks, some hope back to those eyes.
But even then, the case wasn’t exactly closed. I had a name, sure, but what was that really? My client wanted to know who she was, and who a person is is a lot more than a name. What I really had here was a good place to start.
I figured Evelyn Night couldn’t have much by way of family or close friends, or any steady man in her forgotten life. A kept lady or a rich kid with family would’ve been missed by now. It would’ve made the paper, and the cops would be poking around—it would be a whole big mess. Girls who sipped champagne at openings of places like Ambrosia didn’t disappear for three days or more without causing a fuss unless there was nobody to make a fuss. Still, I supposed it was possible she hadn’t been missed because whoever—boyfriend, husband, parents—thought she was somewhere else. A trip to Paris or Nice or some little Greek island. Wasn’t that what rich girls did with their free time? Or maybe someone had filed a missing persons report, but it’d been hushed up to the press for some reason. I wondered how I could check on that without waking the cops up to what I was doing. In any case, my gut told me it didn’t matter: Evelyn Night was a rich loner and the only one looking for her was me. I couldn’t even be sure she was still looking for herself.
Time to take another long shot, I guessed. I picked up the receiver and dialed the operator. When she answered I gave her a fake name and a phony badge number and asked her for the number and address of a Miss Evelyn Night, N-I-G-H-T, like what came after dusk. The operator’s tinny voice went away for a minute and then came back and rattled off the information I’d asked for, which I jotted in my book. The operator went on, “It ain’t listed, but I figure it’s okay, you bein’ a cop and all.” She paused, wanting me to fill her ear with a few grisly details about why I wanted Miss Night’s number. I said “Thanks” and dropped the handset back into its cradle.
The address I’d scribbled under the info cribbed from the old society page was on Elysian Avenue out in Asphodel Meadows, way uptown. Not the priciest part of the city, but getting there. I took a glance at my watch and figured I still had time to make a trip north, if I pushed it. I hurried out into the rain and waved down a cab, then headed off to have a look at the life Evelyn Night had left behind.